A Question of How Women’s Issues Will Fare, in Washington and Overseas

Catherine M. Russell, ambassador at large for global women’s issues, at her Senate confirmation hearing last month.

Christopher Gregory / The New York Times

By SARAH WHEATON

August 22, 2013

WASHINGTON — Catherine M. Russell’s portfolio includes half the population of the planet, roughly 3.5 billion women. But working with the 70,000 employees of the State Department to make women’s issues a permanent priority, she said, may be the “harder slog” in a difficult new job.

“It’s something that most people in the building I think are very receptive to, but it’s a long process,” Ms. Russell said in a recent interview in a coffee shop in downtown Washington.

Ms. Russell’s position, ambassador at large for global women’s issues, was created by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2009 to elevate one of Mrs. Clinton’s longtime causes.

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But Ms. Russell’s new boss, Secretary of State John Kerry, is primarily focused on forging Middle East peace, not women’s issues. The question at the State Department, and among Mrs. Clinton’s friends, is whether the ambassador at large and women’s issues over all will get the attention they once did.

So far the White House says yes. Ms. Russell was a close aide to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. when he was in the Senate, and most recently she was chief of staff to Mr. Biden’s wife, Jill. She is married to Tom Donilon, a former national security adviser to President Obama, who stepped down in June.

“She’s extremely well connected, in a quiet way,” Mr. Biden said in a telephone interview. Ms. Russell is empowered, he said, by “two important things: John Kerry and me.” He quickly added, “And the president.”

Still, Ms. Russell’s White House connections will be tested in a field where success is hard to define and the goals are often amorphous. In a speech in April, Mrs. Clinton said in a typical formulation that she had created the job to weave the perspective of women’s issues “into the fabric of American foreign policy.”

Mrs. Clinton chose as the first women’s ambassador her close friend Melanne Verveer, who was her chief of staff as first lady. In Ms. Verveer’s subsequent travels to more than 60 countries — where she often said that “no country can get ahead if it leaves half its population behind” — leaders always knew she was channeling one of the world’s most famous women.

Ms. Russell does not have that advantage, but said she was determined to carry on Mrs. Clinton’s work. Her mission, she said, is to build on the efforts of the Office of Global Women’s Issues — with its staff of 24 and budget last year of $3.4 million — to “put in place the structure and the mechanisms to keep moving this effort forward long after all of us are gone.”

Officials in the office cite as accomplishments their push to ensure that 300 women took part in nationwide peace talks in Afghanistan in 2010 and their insistence that women’s advancement be codified in the strategic partnership agreement that set forth the relationship between the United States and Afghanistan after 2014.

The office also counts as success stories a $17 million effort in 2009 to crack down on sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo — including training for police officers and judges, and health care and jobs courses for survivors — and an extensive public-private partnership in the Americas that provides female entrepreneurs better access to markets and credit.

“Investing in women, advancing and protecting their rights, is not just the right thing to do morally,” Ms. Russell said during her confirmation hearing in July. “It is the smart thing to do economically and strategically.”

But in the interview, her first since her confirmation as ambassador, Ms. Russell seemed less at ease discussing her new global terrain and more comfortable talking, at length, about the federal bureaucracy she lives and breathes in Washington. She joked that she would have advised Mrs. Biden against giving that kind of long-winded answers. At 52 and the mother of two teenagers, she said she had recovered fully from a minor stroke she suffered last December.

Ms. Russell has not always made women’s issues a professional focus. But they have “been the center of her life and her interests,” Mrs. Biden said in an interview.

In Reading, Pa., Ms. Russell’s parents raised five children — she was the oldest — and ran a small plastics business. She studied philosophy at Boston College before earning a law degree at George Washington University. Ms. Russell first met Mr. Donilon when they worked on Walter F. Mondale’s presidential campaign in 1984. They married in 1991.

By then, Ms. Russell was senior counsel to Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, who testified at her confirmation hearing and is now chairman of the Senate subcommittee in charge of the State Department’s purse. She was also an associate deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration in the mid-1990s.

But most of her experience in Washington comes with the Bidens. In 1994, Ms. Russell helped shepherd the Violence Against Women Act through Congress when Mr. Biden was the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Later, when Mr. Biden led the Foreign Relations Committee, she drafted an international version of the bill as his top adviser on women’s issues. Last year Ms. Russell oversaw an effort by multiple departments to develop an ambitious plan for combating violence against women worldwide.

“I feel like I have a pretty good sense of how the government works,” Ms. Russell said, “and how to move things through the government.”

But she knows she faces hurdles. Jennifer Klein, Ms. Verveer’s former deputy who continues to advise Mrs. Clinton on women’s issues, said, “We obviously dealt with a lot of people at the State Department who were very interested in this, and then we dealt with a lot of people who thought that has nothing to do with their work.”

Others see women’s issues as a marginal focus when there are so many violent conflicts around the world.

“Certainly the problems specifically affecting women in Syria are not unimportant,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former staff member of the National Security Council who is now a scholar at the Brookings Institution. But in such a humanitarian catastrophe, he said, “until you have an answer to the military problem in Syria, you can’t solve any other problem.”

Ms. Russell’s first trip abroad as ambassador — to Bali for a forum on women held at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting, a gathering of business and political leaders from the region — reflects another effort of her office: inserting discussions about women into diplomatic talks.

Mr. Kerry, for his part, held a meeting with businesswomen during his first visit to Afghanistan, and in an opinion article that ran on March 8, International Women’s Day, wrote, “The world’s most pressing economic, social and political problems simply cannot be solved without the full participation of women.”

Such attention to women is a sharp shift from the 1970s and 1980s, when the State Department was embroiled in court battles with female officers who said they had been passed over for policy-making jobs.

As the first man to serve as secretary of state since 2005, Mr. Kerry “will be so effectively powerful as a male secretary to raise these issues with male counterparts,” Ms. Verveer said. “I think it is so counterintuitive, so unexpected.”

These days a course on women’s issues will soon be mandatory for new foreign service officers. In May, a three-day elective version of the course met for the second time in Arlington, Va., at the Foreign Service Institute. But of the 24 students, a mix of seasoned officers and newer recruits, women outnumbered men by a 2-to-1 ratio.

Still, Ms. Russell knows she has the support of one male-dominated organization: the White House. Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff, called her this summer to congratulate her on her confirmation. She told him, she said, that “the bad thing is now I’m going to start bugging you about how the president can help us.”